Rebecca Warren

Rebecca Warren is a sculptor of more or less figurative, more or less expressive forms in clay, bronze and welded steel, and an orchestrator of fragments displayed often but not exclusively within wall-mounted vitrines. She works with an eye to extremes – monstrous excess, alarming paucity – creating a variety of objects that she describes as existing "somewhere on the continuum between pure fleshiness and pure cartoonishness". Hers is a restless, sometimes contradictory art, the result of sustained contemplation of the creative impulse and the mysterious potency of images and objects.

"This experimental, slapstick collision of Giacometti and Disney, literally cast or pressed into one physical body, leaves neither unharmed. In fact Warren's sculpture could be read as a response to culturally entrenched gender tropes - the slender modernist outline on one hand, and the Disneyish codification of cuteness and effervescence on the other hand - colliding in the real world, in real people's lives. Think of the late Amy Winehouse: big breast implants and anorexia. Warren does not merely make illustrative comments by pitting two things against each other, however. There is more at play. Sticking two things together that "don't fit" is just one possible method. Another is to duplicate (while twisting the logic of duplication); another, to alter proportion (elongate, squeeze etc.). And yet another is to use materials and conventions in unconventional ways. Think of Winehouse again: the postmodern mixture of visual styles and the clear modernism of Soul music."